Elizabeth Prouvost, in her nocturnal photographs, fishes, in the dark, black pools of the circles of Hell and Paradise of the body for everything that not only affects it, but also penetrates us. A humid, deep force emerges, penetrating to the bone. We almost experience an odor of musk and mud more than sulfur. Emerging from buried lights, the bodies expand. Captured are the movements of young women These “exquisite corpses” are the sign of a godless intoxication. A paradoxical sun sometimes hollows out stomachs. Noises seem to crack in a flood that shatters death and punishment in its flows. Strange carps, which curl up like serpents, exist here and there.
“In this series, I’m showing a new work on the formless,” explains Elizabeth Prouvost. “It should be titled: Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (What we see, what watches us), the title of a book by Georges Didi-Huberman. An absolutely multiple body. A journey to the edge of possibility, the extremes of the body’s possibility… The principle of my photos from each session is the “not knowing”. I think that it’s necessary to refute the reality of each moment, and to render it insane, proliferative, active, creative… to finally open the secret toy that is the body, continually liberate its OTHER. I’m trying to transform scattered, wild energy into life form. To go from frenetic movement to the sensible figure while conserving the speed of the emergence. So there is no longer an outside, no longer an inside, all is present. Destroying the body without renouncing it.”
With sensitivity and tenderness, Elizabeth Prouvost pulls the brute out of the waters. She lays the gasping on the feverish banks of haze. There remains the strange hypnosis of desires which have not fallen silent; there, the viewer adopts these bodies, trapped but laid against him. No matter if the excrement of sin flows in his blood.
Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret
Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret is a poet, critic, and Lecturer in Communications at the Université de Savoie in France.
